By now, you may have started Helena María Viramontes’s exceptional 1995 novel, Under the Feet of Jesus. So much tension accrues in its early pages. Estrella, a young girl from a migrant Mexican American farmworker family, is traveling with her mother, her siblings, and Perfecto, a man who has become something of a surrogate father. The family arrives north in the Central Valley to pick grapes in the field—it’s a fruit that carries resonance with the farmworkers’ movement and strengthens the political subtext of the book. Estrella is keenly aware that her backbreaking labor is erased by the smiling, bonneted girl on the red raisin boxes at the market. Pain and hunger and hardship haunt these powerful pages, but always, too, there is beauty. It can be startling to return from this story into one’s own reality.
We are already seeing some of the intense turbulence anticipated for the fall. This autumn, we’ll delve into three meaningful, engrossing books that can, hopefully, counter the way it feels for many of us to be in this challenging historical moment. For your pleasure, we’ve selected a traditional memoir of boyhood by a Palo Alto author, a vivid Los Angeles crime novel that kicked off a career, and a surprising Southern California literary novel about memory and family bonds.
THIS BOY’S LIFE, BY TOBIAS WOLFF
Many of us loved reading as children because it allowed us to enter other times and places. Tobias Wolff’s eloquent classic fulfills that need by whisking us away to his adolescence in the Pacific Northwest. The 1989 memoir’s opening pages read like a novel: Wolff and his mother, with whom he is exceptionally close, leave Florida in a quest for uranium. There’s a hint of Charles Dickens’s doubles here—Wolff’s brother lives an utterly different life in East Coast private schools. Later on, in Seattle, when his mother marries an abusive man, following a pattern of succumbing to tyrannical men, Wolff assumes a range of personae. He schemes to reinvent himself into a different stratum, engaging in petty crimes and dishonesties along the way. Class influenced the paths that young Wolff believed were possible. It was only many years after the events in these pages that he turned his motley experiences into gold.
VIOLENT SPRING, BY GARY PHILLIPS
In the aftermath of the Rodney King riots, Los Angeles is ripped apart. During a ground-breaking ceremony intended to heal the city, the body of Korean shop owner Kim Bong-Suh is discovered. A Black private eye, Ivan Monk, is retained by the Korean American Merchant’s Group to investigate his death, which seems racially motivated. As in all good hard-boiled fiction, a series of gritty obstacles present themselves to our tough protagonist. While the trenchant political commentary still rings true, the novel is memorable in part for its particular sensory details and its romantic vibe, particularly when it comes to Monk’s relationship with an intelligent Superior Court judge, Jill Kodama. You might be reminded of this James Baldwin quote: “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” These pages surge with that kind of love for L.A. and its people.
GOODBYE, VITAMIN, BY RACHEL KHONG
A novel about Alzheimer’s that is also quite lovely and funny? Rachel Khong’s quirky debut accomplishes that feat. In these luminous pages, a 30-year-old woman, Ruth, returns home from the Bay Area to Los Angeles after her fiancé dumps her for someone else. Her mother asks her to stay and help with the care of her father, a beloved history professor who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and who caused emotional wreckage by getting involved with another woman after Ruth left for college. As Ruth cares for him, she starts to remember his care of her; her diaristic narration turns into a moving direct address. He had always been the memory keeper, but in his decline, she must become the one who gathers the moments of their lives. Insights about family and memory, and how we care for one another through real difficulties, streak across these pages. That grace stays with you.
Join us on August 15 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Helena María Viramontes will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Manuel Muñoz to discuss Under the Feet of Jesus. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
EXCERPT
Read an extract from Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus, the August California Book Club selection. —Alta
WHY READ THIS
Alta Journal books editor David L. Ulin recommends Viramontes’s book, saying, “The past may not predict the future, but it lingers as an immovable force.” —Alta
EVENT RECAP
If you missed the event with Venita Blackburn, read the recap or watch the video. —Alta
STORIES OF AZRAEL
Ulin reviews Joy Williams’s “koan-like miniatures” in Concerning the Future of Souls. —Alta
DECEPTION OF MARRIAGE
Alta Journal associate editor Jessica Blough interviews author Sarah Manguso about the generation of straight women who came of age after Roe v. Wade was decided and expected greater equality. Manguso’s latest book, Liars, “lays bare the myth of these heterosexual relationships.” —Alta
MOVIE NIGHT
Join R.O. Kwon, prior special guest Ingrid Rojas Contreras, and Zyzzyva editor and CBC selection panelist Oscar Villalon to watch Secretary, Kwon’s favorite film, as part of a new series from the literary magazine. —Roxie Theater
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